10 Daily Things

Total Organizer is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) that helps you organize and plan your business and personal life.

What’s unique about the app, is that it allows you to store all of your contacts, tasks (calendar), notes, and to-do lists divided into tree-structured categories. In addition, each item (be it a note, task, contact ,etc) may belong to several categories (tags).

So, this is a combination of folders (tree) and tags. Note, that if you create subfolders (subcategories) - then by opening a folder you can see all the items belonging to it, and the contents of all its subfolders. So, by opening root folder (at the top), you can see all items of given type (e.g. notes, if you’re in “notes” tab). Freeware.

Download Total Organizer >>>

When you mount a USB drive on a Windows system, it wants to assign it a drive letter. That seems entirely reasonable. Unfortunately, sometimes Windows isn’t very smart about the letter it assigns, meaning that if the letter it wants to assign to your removable drive is already in use, perhaps for a network volume, you may never see your USB device in Windows Explorer. It doesn’t matter how cool a flash drive like this is if you can’t use it.

USB Drive Letter Manager is a tool that helps deal with this problem. Rather than relying on the good graces of the operating system from Redmond, it uses its own logic to supply a useful drive letter to your device, making sure that you can actually use it.

USB Drive Letter Manager runs as a service on Windows versions from Win2k up through Vista. It is provided as freeware for private and educational use.

Download USB Drive Letter Manager >>>

Did you ever wonder how iTunes or other media players know so much about the files they’re playing? I mean, you’ve got a file with a name like “my-cool-audio-file.mp3″ but when you load it into your player, it tells you that it’s actually “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” from The Beatles’ White Album. This bit of data sleight-of-hand is accomplished though the use of an “id3 tag”, a bit of meta-data that many media files carry along with the actual content of the file itself. This meta data includes information about the title and number of the track, the artist, the album, and more.

If you need to tweak this information, or maybe add more to it, you need a tool to access it. That’s where ToeTag comes in.

Named, unfortunately perhaps, after the coroner’s favorite means of identification, ToeTag lets you add, edit, or delete meta information stored in your media files. Add a track name, correct a misspelling, or even enter information about the bitrate of the recording, or the composer of the piece. You can also grab song information on-line from the free tracktype.org server.

ToeTag works on Windows Vista and Windows XP with .NET 2.0.

Download Toe Tag >>>

Istanbul is one of the more widely used desktop recording software out there. You can download Istanbul from here. Debian and Fedora users should be able to install it from the repo. Istanbul has a very simple interface (or lack of).

When you first start up Istanbul, you will see a small red button on your desktop panel.

Right click on the button and it will give you options and ways to record you desktop by window you choose or desktop area you select by mouse.

You can stop recording you session by left clicking on the record button, and it will prompt you save the screencast:

By default, Istanbul saves your video in Ogg format.

Read about 4 more screencash software for Linux >>>

Spacewalk manages software content updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Linux distributions such as Fedora, CentOS, and Scientific Linux, within your firewall. You can stage software content through different environments, managing the deployment of updates to systems and allowing you to view at which update level any given system is at across your deployment. A clean central web interface allows viewing of systems and their software update status, and initiating update actions.

In addition to software content management, Spacewalk provides provisioning and monitoring capabilities. It will enable you to kickstart systems, as well as manage and deploy configuration files. Spacewalk’s monitoring feature allows you to view monitoring status for your systems alongside their software update status. Spacewalk also has virtualization capabilities to enable you to provision, control, manage, and monitor virtual Xen guests.

In bried, Spacewalk allows you to:

• Inventory your systems (hardware and software information)
• Install and update software on your systems
• Collect and distribute your custom software packages into manageable groups
• Provision (kickstart) your systems
• Manage and deploy configuration files to your systems
• Monitor your systems
• Provision and start/stop/configure virtual guests
• Distribute content across multiple geographical sites in an efficient manner.